Buscador

jueves, 3 de julio de 2014

Lessons on Love's Obscenity (Adam Colin Chambers)

First
released in Off Beat Cinema Magazine #03, in April 2011, Amsterdam

Lessons on
Love’s Obscenity

Obscéne / Obscene

Discredited by modern opinion, love’s
sentimentality must be assumed by the amorous
subject as a powerful transgression which leaves
him alone and exposed; by a reversal of values,
then, it is this sentimentality which today
constitutes love’s obscenity.

- Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse 1

As with schools and cathedrals, the
cinema also plays a role in socializing us through its lessons on love. In the
throes of passion, who can deny uttering a line or performing a gesture that we
once encountered on the screen? In these moments, with an uncanny sense of déjà vu, we
briefly become the actors of our dreams; acting out films, in the movie that is
our life. (oh god, what a horrible admission…)

But cinema also helps us
transgress such images, moments, and gestures. Through its movements, it
sometimes guides us beyond the heteronormative impressions left upon our
brains, and reminds us that we still have some semblance of control over whom
and what we love – even the concept of ‘love’ itself.

Xavier Dolan’s recent J’ai tué ma mere (2009) offers audiences
with a beautiful sex scene that far surpasses the usual depictions of high
school romance. With collage-style editing, and an abundance of paint, the two
male actors wrestle each other to the floor, and have sex to an awesome musical
score.

Gaspar Noé’s Enter
the Void (2009)also transgresses
mainstream ideas of love, but with images that are extremely scarring. The film
presents a critical deconstruction of intimacy that focuses on the radical
materiality of sex. There are images revealing p. o. v. close-ups of vaginal penetration,
alongside orgiastic scenes of emptiness at a neon-Tokyo-brothel in the middle
of the night.

Although these films offer inspiring
cinematic experiences, and succeed in transgressing taboos and stereotypes,
perhaps they fall short in crossing what Roland Barthes describes as love’s
most obscene aspect of all: namely, its sentimentality.

In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes writes that in our modern age, by some
historical reversal, “it is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental
– censured in the name of what is in fact only another morality.” In other
words, today, love’s true obscenity is its sentimentality (it is what is most
hidden by the morality police of consumer culture).

If we follow Barthes point then, the
most transgressive films of all should be the ones that explore sentimentality,
and not simply sexuality. In other words, there is an abject quality to
sentimentality that surpasses even the most obscene representations of sex
(incest, rape, paedophilia, etc.) and for this reason must be addressed in any
meditation on transgression.

The pain we feel in Death in Venice (1971), when Gustave von
Aschenbach slowly succumbs to his death, sitting on the beach, as he stares at
his pure image of love; an adolescent boy representing everything he lacks.

Marco’s tears in Hable con Ella (2002) following the suicide of his friend – the man
who taught him how to love, and how to talk.

And in Mädchen in Uniform (1931), the teacher- student relationship that
reveals the deep pleasures of pedagogy, while truly pushing the boundaries of
critical cinematic eroticism.

Together, with such films, let’s move
beyond the conventional taboos of the present, and try to explore an old
transgression that is often neglected.